Tutorials

Welcome. These are learning-oriented walkthroughs: you'll follow along at your keyboard, run every command, and watch real output appear. Nothing here is hypothetical — each step is something you actually do, in order, and it's meant to just work.

If you want reference material (every flag, every generator) or task recipes, those live elsewhere in the docs. Tutorials are for your first time — hand-held, concrete, and safe to get wrong. You'll build a real understanding of how Phony trains models and generates data, one small win at a time.

What you'll learn

Work through these in order. Each one builds on the last.

1. Train your first model — install the CLI, feed it a small list of names, and train a real n-gram model. You'll learn what a model is and how to inspect one.
2. Generate your first data — write a tiny generator definition, produce values from a seed, and see for yourself that the same seed always yields the same data. You'll meet the three most common generators: logic, list, and model.
3. Build a coherent record — compose a user profile where the email is derived from the name, so they always agree. This is the payoff: coherent, realistic, reproducible records.

By the end you'll have trained a model, generated data three different ways, and built a record whose fields hang together. That's the whole core loop.

Ready? Start with Train your first model.